On the Night Train

Steph, Fred and Jason in our little room on the hard bunks

From Hanoi, Jason and I, along with two new friends, a French couple, Fred and Steph, took the train to the small mountain town of Sapa. Most tourists book the train through a tour agency and travel in the special tourist cars. No, we decided, we weren't going to do that. We'd book our own tickets and ride with the locals for less than half the price. There are many different classes of tickets and we wanted the soft sleeper- the best- for our 9 hour overnight journey. Unfortunately all the soft sleepers were already sold, so we had to settle for the hard sleeper- the second best.

I thought it would be okay. In China we had taken the soft sleeper, which was clean, comfortable, and quiet. We heard the hard sleeper was basically the same thing there, just as comfortable. We found out the hard way that that is not the case in Vietnam.

At the train station we made our way to our dirty old train car and found our little compartment which the four of us would share with two more locals. It was not clean. It was not comfortable. And it was definitely not quiet. To sleep on, we had rock solid linolium bunks covered by a thin bamboo mat. All night long people shouted in the hallways, which didn't really matter because the roar of the train through the open window was already loud enough.

And I'm not even going to talk about the condition of the bathroom.

The four of us stayed up for a while sitting on the bottom bunks playing cards so that we would hopefully be so tired we would just crash. And it worked, except for the fact that we all woke up everytime the train made a stop- about every 10 km.

Thanks, but we're taking the tourist train on the way back.

More Xi'an

After visiting the warriors (that took up most of the day), we went back to the city and decided to do some more exploring while we had some daylight. We went up onto the city walls, which encircle all of the original city and are surrounded by a moat. The walls are BIG. They're probably 20 meters high and about 10 meters wide at the top - thicker at the bottom. You can rent bikes on top of the walls and ride around, which looked like great fun if it weren't so cold. So instead, we just walked around for a little bit and enjoyed the sights from high off the ground.

Later that night, we went with some other people we met on our warrior tour (they're also English teachers in Korea) to see and water and light show. The show is supposed to be China's biggest water show, but it really wasn't anything to brag about. I got bored of it after about a minute (especially because it was so cold! See a theme here?). But the show was located in a plaza next to the Big Goose Pagoda, one of Xi'an's most famous sites. So at least we got to see a nice attraction while we were there.

After the water show, I started feeling my cold rise up again. So I ended up spending the rest of the night and most of the next day in bed. There was a lot more things that I wanted to see in Xi'an that I didn't get to. The next day while I was laying in bed trying to get better, I decided to take part in an ancient Chinese tradition: acupuncture. The hostel I was staying at had a Chinese doctor that could come and preform various Chinese treatments, such as acupuncture, cupping, toxin scraping and massage. My back was really bothering me and I had the cold and I knew this was going to be the cheapest acupuncture I could ever get, so I went for it. I got a little freaked out when he quickly jabbed a needle in my cheek and then poked it around a little bit. He put four needles in me (two in my face, two in my back) and it was a little scary, but I got through it and had my first acupuncture experience.

That night, we took an overnight train from Xi'an to Beijing. It took about 11 hours and we got beds in a "soft sleeper." There were 4 bunks in our little room which we shared with a Chinese man and woman. They went to sleep right away and Jason and I tried to go to sleep after about an hour or so. Lucky Jason slept through the night just fine, but I hardly slept a wink. It didn't help being sick, and then our car got incredibly hot and I was sweating all night long. And with the noise from the tracks and being jerked around, it just wasn't a good combination of things...